Sound Check Presents: The Unband

Whatâ€™s it like to be in a rock & roll band? No, no, no, I mean a real rock & roll band. The legendary Unband is that kind of band. Those guys could drink you under the table, but why should they prove themselves to you, punk? Bassist Mike Ruffino answers my questions.

Yes, people have been kind, thankfully. Very much an improvement on the feedback I was getting before the book came out, coming almost exclusively from a yawning void that contained mocking laughter on the scale of the aggregate of wrath of the Old Testament. That's not to say that the book means all that much. It's just a thing. The only difference now is a smattering of writing jobs, and that sometimes I get called an "author," which would be nice if I wrote about things my mother could be proud of.

Have you ever grown tired of being cast in an alcohol-soaked, drug-filled role? Part of me thinks that you have embraced the persona in a way as a big eff-you to the corporatization of rock and roll. Why not play a role if everyone else is? Am I on the right track or totally nuts?

It's not really in our programming to play a role, so it's surprising to be reminded that we do. Really, any statement aside from "Hey, we're pretty wasted right now," is unintentional, despite our consummate disgust with the corporate world's assimilation of rock & roll, or of practically anything else for that matter. But I don't get tired of our lot much, no, not in any way a good nap and some Vitamin B won't fix. What I've come to realize personally is that some people need vicarious drugs and alcohol way more than I want drugs and alcohol, which is fairly often. These are the people that come up in the middle of the afternoon and express genuine disappointment that I'm not having forty martinis and jamming angel dust into my face. Fact is, if I were doing that half as much as they'd like to think I am, I wouldn't have a quarter of the life or the friends I have, and I certainly wouldn't be capably making any books or records. So filling that role has little to do with us, or with what we actually do. I'm not saying I'm not as high as the sultan of Venus at the moment, I'm just saying.We Like to Drink, We Like to Play Rock and Roll is screening during this year's NIFF. Can you tell me a little bit about the movie and how it came about?

The film emerged over a period of about seven years. The director, Lexie Shabel, followed us around with a camera between 1998 and 2001, documenting our traveling skills and all the accompanying theatrics. What made it to the screen is culled from that footage, performances and hundreds of hours of incriminating archival stuff sent in by people who claim to be our friends. Lexie then came back last year and shot some follow-ups to advance the denouement, as it were, or at least to get some updated crapulence, which in our case is pretty much the same thing.

And at the end if the day, it wound up being sort of a local film, despite being shot all over the continent and assembled at Lexie's way out in the New Mexican desert. Kenyon King is a local, he very significantly came on as the editor and music supervisor, absolutely tirelessly, and the indispensable Mark Miller (Slaughterhouse Studio, radiovalkyrie.com) did all the sound editing--a considerable job, cleaning up the invariably chaotic live sound and so much slurred dialogue. The last piece was that gradually Joe Reilly started coming around and wound up inexplicably keeping the whole thing from descending into incoherence and madness. Odd, since he's renown for having the opposite effect. He's from Springfield originally, curious in itself. <>

Tell me about The Elevens show you have assembled after the films.

The Upper Crust are on the bill because The Beatles were unavailable. That they're playing before us might make us seem a little like we're tossing firecrackers around after the storming of the Bastille, but the idea was to put together the best show possible, so there you go. Ideal Rifle. Eugene [Ferrari â€“ Unbandâ€™s drummer] and I saw them a few months back, and liked them quite a bit. I wish we had time to include more bands on the bill--Hot Black comes to mind--but there are more Saturdays.

Ideal Rifle is a made up of two former members of one of my favorite defunct bands, Cyclub. How has the local scene helped or informed you as a band? You have such a New York attitude/following, yet your roots are in this placid little arts town in Western Massachusetts. Dichotomy, no?

I'll put it this way: In New York you get invited to a "party" which is a thing with a DJ in a club that's far more expensive than you'd normally tolerate, where you pretend to be nice to a socialite who's written a vapid novel about handbags, and you can't get properly drunk until you go to the next place. We know full well what an actual party is, and it involves doing keg stands in someone's muddy kitchen at four a.m. like a %$#&ing human.

Other than the november gig, is the unband still playing shows, regularly?We've played a few here and there, but we're still sort of revving up. There will be more. But on the record, we play for money now.

The Unband is Mike Ruffino, Matt Pierce and Eugene Ferrari. Catch the film We Like to Drink, We Like to Play Rock and Rollat the Northampton Film Festival on Saturday, November 11 followed by a show at The Elevens with The Upper Crust, Ideal Rifle and The Unband, starting at 10 p.m.